The scriptures are laid before thee, yea, and all things denote there is a God;
yea, even the earth, and all things that are upon the face of it, yea, and its motion,
yea, and also all the planets which move in their regular form
do witness that there is a Supreme Creator.

—Alma 30:44

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Thursday, October 21, 2010

Yod

I dislike it when people pronounce coupon as CYOO-pon (mouse over for the IPA [1]) instead of COO-pon. Once, when I was complaining about this unfortunate phenomenon, my sister, Camille informed me that historically the long u was pronounced with a y before it. I've since investigated her claim and learned more about it.[2]

She's mostly right. That unwritten-but-pronounced y is called a yod by linguists. And it used to exist in a majority of cases in English. But not all. In a few cases it was used to distinguish between similar words. For example, choose was pronounced CHOOZE, while chews was pronounced CHYOOZE; do was pronounced DOO, while dew was pronounced DYOO.[3]

Many English dialects, especially General American, are going through a process termed yod dropping. It is from this that my pickiness about the pronunciation of coupon arises. Some cases of yod dropping come about because the yod is in a position within a word that just makes it hard to pronounce, so we've eliminated it. This includes words like juice, lute, rude, suit, and blue.[4]

In other cases we've kept the yod: Matthew, beautiful, feud, mute, failure, and cue, to name a few. Others are retained in Received Pronunciation (upscale British English) but lost in General American, such as new, student, and tune. And there are some words, like soup and moon, which never had the yod. This variability in pronunciation, coupled with a lack of corresponding spelling, is often confusing for foreigners trying to learn English.

Recently this was brought again to my attention when, in a ward council meeting, my bishop (who teaches Shakespeare in the English Department at BYU), pronounced the word prelude as PRELL-yood.

I mentioned this to Leann. In the past we've bantered (good-naturedly, of course) about the pronunciation of certain words. I pronounce the word cumin as CUMM-in, while she pronounces it CYOO-min; I pronounce the word culinary as CYOO-li-NARE-ee, while she pronounces it CULL-in-AIR-ee. Additionally, it bugs her that I pronounce the word curlew (a type of shorebird) as CURL-you instead of CURR-loo.

But this time she playfully disavowed ever using the yod in her speech. I insisted that she did, citing the cases mentioned in the previous paragraph. Still she denied that the yod was in any way a part of her pronunciation. Finally I prevailed upon her by pointing out that she'd rather be a CYOO-tee than a COO-tee![5]